MD5 - History and Cryptanalysis

History and Cryptanalysis

MD5 is one in a series of message digest algorithms designed by Professor Ronald Rivest of MIT (Rivest, 1994). When analytic work indicated that MD5's predecessor MD4 was likely to be insecure, MD5 was designed in 1991 to be a secure replacement. (Weaknesses were indeed later found in MD4 by Hans Dobbertin.)

In 1993, Den Boer and Bosselaers gave an early, although limited, result of finding a "pseudo-collision" of the MD5 compression function; that is, two different initialization vectors which produce an identical digest.

In 1996, Dobbertin announced a collision of the compression function of MD5 (Dobbertin, 1996). While this was not an attack on the full MD5 hash function, it was close enough for cryptographers to recommend switching to a replacement, such as SHA-1 or RIPEMD-160.

The size of the hash—128 bit—is small enough to contemplate a birthday attack. MD5CRK was a distributed project started in March 2004 with the aim of demonstrating that MD5 is practically insecure by finding a collision using a birthday attack.

MD5CRK ended shortly after 17 August 2004, when collisions for the full MD5 were announced by Xiaoyun Wang, Dengguo Feng, Xuejia Lai, and Hongbo Yu. Their analytical attack was reported to take only one hour on an IBM p690 cluster.

On 1 March 2005, Arjen Lenstra, Xiaoyun Wang, and Benne de Weger demonstrated construction of two X.509 certificates with different public keys and the same MD5 hash, a demonstrably practical collision. The construction included private keys for both public keys. A few days later, Vlastimil Klima described an improved algorithm, able to construct MD5 collisions in a few hours on a single notebook computer. On 18 March 2006, Klima published an algorithm that can find a collision within one minute on a single notebook computer, using a method he calls tunneling.

In 2009, the United States Cyber Command used an MD5 hash of their mission statement as a part of their official emblem.

On December 24, 2010, Tao Xie and Dengguo Feng announced the first published single-block (512 bit) MD5 collision. Previous collision discoveries relied on multi-block attacks. For "security reasons", Xie and Feng did not disclose the new attack method. They have issued a challenge to the cryptographic community, offering a US$ 10,000 reward to the first finder of a different 64-byte collision before January 1, 2013.

In 2011, an informational RFC was approved to update the security considerations in RFC 1321 (MD5) and RFC 2104 (HMAC-MD5).